Deference and Defiance in Monterrey: Workers, Paternalism, and Revolution in Mexico, 1890–1950

by Michael Snodgrass

• ISBN13: 9780521811897
• ISBN10: 0521811899
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2003-06-02
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

The first comprehensive history of labour relations and the working class in twentieth-century Monterrey, Deference and Defiance explores how both workers and industrialists perceived, responded to and helped shape the outcome of Mexico's revolution. Snodgrass's narrative covers a sixty-year period that begins with Monterrey's emergence as one of Latin-America's pre-eminent industrial cities. He then explores the roots of two distinct and enduring systems of industrial relations that were both historical outcomes of the revolution: company paternalism and militant unionism. By comparing four local industries - steel, beer, glass and smelting - Snodgrass demonstrates how workers and managers collaborated in the development of paternalistic labour regimes that built upon working-class traditions of mutual aid as well as elite resistance to state labour policies. Deference and Defiance in Monterrey thus offers an urban and industrial perspective to a history of revolutionary Mexico that remains overshadowed by studies of the countryside.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	xi
Introduction	1	(7)
Porfirian Progress in ``Mexico's Chicago''	8	(23)
Revolution Comes to Monterrey	31	(23)
Work, Gender, and Paternalism at the Cuauhtemoc Brewery	54	(28)
Making Steel and Forging Men at the Fundidora	82	(25)
The Democratic Principles of Our Revolution: Labor Movements and Labor Law in the 1920s	107	(38)
Every Class Has Its Leaders: ASARCO, The Great Depression, and Popular Protest in Monterrey	145	(21)
Stay with the Company or Go with the Reds	166	(36)
State Your Position!: Conservatives, Communists, and Cardenismo	202	(27)
The Quotas of Power: Organized Labor and the Politics of Consensus	229	(22)
The Persistence of Paternalism	251	(31)
The Institutionalized Revolution	282	(33)
Select Bibliography of Primary Sources	315	(2)
Index	317